3 Stations East

MacBook, Loud Shirts and Coffee, and 1995 Deja Vu

nobody@vox.com(Paul) — Wed, 02 May 2007 12:09:21 -0500

The MacBook is back and better than ever. The Apple Store replaced my finicky SuperDrive and had it back to me in a day (well, technically less.) There's definitely a Ping coming about the lousy, stupid reservation system for the Genius Bar though - it doesn't work, or at least, didn't for me.

Just glad the thing can read CDs again.

II.

Yesterday morning I was drinking coffee in the car when I started to spill some. I feared the worst, imagining it had spilled on my shirt. I looked down to see all of it had been spilled onto the seat belt. So I said out loud...

"Saved by the BELT!"

IIa.

Of course I spilled coffee on myself here at work about an hour ago. This time, not so lucky as I wasn't wearing a seat belt. The upside is that my shirt's pattern is loud enough to mask any coffee spill.

III.

I added both the new Tori Amos and Nine Inch Nails albums to my ever-growing "albums to buy" list. It's like it's 1995 all over again, isn't it?

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Liquid Lunch / Little Things

nobody@vox.com(Paul) — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 10:28:37 -0500

Two in one:

On Thursday I stopped by an ice cream shoppe (yes, it was a shoppe) to get a milkshake after lunch. It was great - the people were friendly, the ice cream was tasty, and the milkshake was equally tasty. A curious thing happened when I was paying though: the woman ringing up my order asked, "Liquid lunch?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Liquid lunch?"

"No, no, this is dessert."

I thought it was a little odd. I guess given the time of day it was all right though; it was about noon, as I had taken an early lunch. But still, a milkshake for lunch?

Sometimes it's the little things.

My MacBook, like all modern Apple laptops, includes the handy "put two fingers and flick your trackpad" scrolling mechanism. This, I love. It is a brilliant way to scroll versus having a dedicated scroll wheel (still fantastic). It works just about perfectly: put down two fingers, glide, scroll. There you go.

My work PC, an hp laptop, includes a scroll area on its trackpad. Originally when I got it I thought, "Huh, same thing!" so I just did the same two-finger scroll. That didn't work quite right. Turns out that within the scroll area (designated by white parallel horizontal lines), one just needs one finger. Okay. Fine. Still handy. Oh, and the pointer on screen changes into a little pointer working within a little scrollbar. Over the top. Unnecessary ("gee, I'm scrolling?!")

Oh, but it's finicky. If my finger falls out of the scroll area on the trackpad (possible, I am klutzy) then I stop scrolling. Worse - much much worse - is that the thing I want to scroll must have focus on the screen first. This is insane. The fracking OS knows where my mouse is pointed - why doesn't it just scroll the thing? And yes, the Mac implementation requires that the window has focus - that makes sense - but not the control itself.

So if I want to scroll my message list in Outlook, I can't just hover over the list and scroll. I have to move to the list, click it (selecting a message in the process, something I don't want to do), and then scroll. This extra step might seem small but it is, in fact, an enormous inconvenience.

It makes perfect sense from a programming standpoint, but just about zero sense from a usability standpoint. Awesome.

3. (a bonus)

I'm pleased that my rental car still has new car smell.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

MacBook Essentials?

nobody@vox.com(Paul) — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 17:05:59 -0600

Now that I've made the jump from a desktop to a laptop I need to ask: what are the essential utilities and thingamajigs I need with a MacBook?

Software is pretty much covered. And the machine will be in limbo for two reasons: a) vacation next week; b) I'm upgrading the HD and memory.

(One nice bonus is that I ordered a machine with 512MB knowing full well I'd upgrade it... and it shipped with a gig. Thanks, Apple!)

Read and post comments | Send to a friend